Reform Pittsburgh Now Site

Blogging from Podcamp downtown.

I just came from the press conference announcing the official opening of Reform Pittsburgh Now website. Looks like an interesting idea.

Councilman Bill Peduto ran the show with the newly famous and ever apple-cheeked Justine sitting just to his left. The room was dark (better to see the projected websites, my dear) and cool and completely full. Agent Ska was there with her camera. Rauterkus live blogged. I felt completely old-skool with a pen and paper.

As far as I can tell, the website's a blending, a co-mingling if you will, in an odd post-modern Reece's Peanut Butter Cups sort of way, of local politics and something Bill Peduto called "social media." Justine et al were to be the "social media" part of the venture. Peduto's former campaign manager Matt Preston will be in charge.

Peduto began the announcement by saying that the Pittsburgh city council will have a new make-up in January as three of the nine will be newcomers. But as yet there's no new agenda to reform the city. This is where the website and it's related Political Action Committee come in.

PACs are usually run, he said, by special interest groups, law firms, lobbyists, and the like. This PAC, he said, will be different. Run out of cyberspace, pushing for reform and transparency in local government, it'll be something new in these parts. It'll be a new way for more people to get involved in the process.

In an earlier session today, I heard Cynthia Closkey and Christina Schulman discuss how blogs can create a community of readers. In the case of Reform Pittsburgh Now, Peduto's looking to form a community of people all linked by their own interest in reforming the local political scene. He's looking to to raise the bar above the "personality politics" that's been the status quo for so long and to create an interactive forum for local folks to be better involved in the process.

There'll be a calendar of events, a library for public documents and so on. In a few months, there'll be so much material in the website's "library" that one could spend every minute of a weekend and still not have enough time to get through it all. Every minute of a weekend (48 hours x 60 minutes/hour) is, I think, 2,880 minutes. That's a lot of minutes.

I was curious about the funding, though. In the question period after the presentation, I asked how all this was being paid for. Bill said that the first $3000 came from his mayoral campaign account. The after that, he approached political types of every stripe for funding.

The PAC, as it's set up, is prohibited from endorsing particular candidates. When asked how it could then influence any politicians, he said that the PAC (and the website) would be making it easier for people to contact officials on their own. That's the pressure.

Bottom line, he said, was to make it fun - get the negativity out of local politics.

Sounds like a good idea.